"An Impasse" by Ewan McPhee

I sat upon the bench with the old drunk and watched the two ospreys out above the cresting white caps, flying parallel to one another and then taking turns flying at an angle to scare off the other, as if one were following the other, but both assumed they were leading and thus found it strange that their follower should come so close to maiming them out above the sea, where each knew that maiming meant certain death, but they weren’t really flying at all, they were hovering, staying in the same spot, flapping wings and clearly exerting themselves but staying counter to the wind, and sometimes one would turn its head as if to say Look what we’ve gotten ourselves into, and the other would shrug as if to say Maybe we should just go home and make a sandwich since we probably have some ham and cheddar in the fridge, but they never did turn around, at least as far as the drunk and I were concerned they never turned around, and he bummed a smoke from me and we sat and watched them until the cigarettes were butts and then we smoked two more and it was getting dark and it was hard to see the ospreys anymore and they hadn’t made any progress but they certainly hadn’t given up, and so the drunk said Let’s get drunk and I said Sure thing and we walked back into town along the road past the shipyard and talked about Melville who he hadn’t read but talked about as if he had, as if he had known him like a drinking buddy, like he had been good enough pals with him to pay unsolicited house calls, especially in the author’s later years, when he was holed up in a small room in New York and whiling away forgotten by the world, and then the drunk and I sat down at a long table and got drunk with total strangers, and eventually this drinking devolved into fist fights, and there we were, back to back, fending off the hordes of other drunks (the drunks who had not known Melville personally), and there was blood and glass everywhere but that did not make a difference, we stood our ground and they stood theirs, and we were at what you could call an impasse, I guess, and then the proprietor shut the lights off and everyone laughed and walked out, at which point the drunk said Come on, I’ll give you a drive home, and we got in his car and drove to a house that was not my house, was not even close to my house, but the light was on and there was a white fridge in the kitchen, which always means cold beer, but a figure stepped in front of the window, watching us, outlined by the electric light behind her, and the drunk did not seem very drunk anymore, and he turned and asked me what I thought the worth of suffering was and I said There is a great vanity in suffering and in silence, and he didn’t say anything but his mouth was hanging open in an odd way, like he was mouthing something silently, and all the while I was thinking about how pretentious I was, how pretentious I am, and we sat there wondering whether we should go in, the drunk sometimes placing his fingers over the keys resting in the ignition as if he were about to pull out of the driveway and drive us back into the night but we opened our doors and laughed and walked towards the porch.